Today, Explained - Impeachment Day

Episode Date: December 19, 2019

The House of Representatives impeached President Donald Trump today. Vox’s Andrew Prokop explains what comes next. (Transcript here.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, 18 December 2019, is an historic day for these United States. We gather today under the dome of this temple of democracy to exercise one of the most solemn powers that this body can take. The impeachment of the President of the United States. 146 days after President Trump called up Ukrainian President Zelensky and asked for a favor. 128 days after an anonymous whistleblower filed a complaint accusing the president of using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country into the 2020 election. After weeks of congressional hearings, witnesses, the House drew up articles.

It has impeached the 45th president of the United States, Donald John Trump. On this vote, the yeas are 230. The nays are 197. Present is one. Article one is adopted. On this vote, the yeas are 229. The nays are 198.

Present is 1. Article 2 is adopted. So both articles of impeachment passed in separate votes. And almost every Democrat voted yes, as did independent Justin Amash, who left the Republican Party earlier this year. No current Republicans voted yes, though, and joining the Republicans to vote no were Democrat Colin Peterson of Minnesota and Representative Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, who is in the process of switching from the Democratic to the Republican Party. Andrew Prokop, Politics Vox, was there anything particularly surprising about how the final vote was called? I don't know if it's surprising, but it was interesting to me that the 30 or so Democrats who represent districts that Donald Trump won in 2016 overwhelmingly voted to impeach him,

including many in very tough districts that Trump won big, including many freshmen who were just elected for the first time in 2018. They ended up deciding these charges are of sufficient gravity. The evidence proves them. And, you know, it may be a political risk for me, but I'm going to go ahead and vote to impeach. I know it sounds different, but there just has to be some decisions that are beyond the political calculus. Is there anything significant about the margin of the vote?

It was roughly in line with the margin that the House of Representatives voted to impeach Bill Clinton back in 1998. The House was controlled by Republicans at the time, and there was a roughly similar partisan split. It doesn't hold a candle, though, to how lopsided the vote was to impeach Andrew Johnson in 1868. The House was smaller then, but it was a 126 to 47 vote. So, you know, more than two to one. And is it Johnson, Clinton, and now Trump, the only times we've gotten this far in this process? Yep, they are now the three presidents in history to be impeached. I have never been a quitter. Richard Nixon was going to be impeached, but he resigned before that could happen. So now, as we've anticipated, this is moving to the Senate. Is the House completely done with impeachment? So the next move is for the House to name its impeachment managers.

They will be members of the House of Representatives who will go over to the Senate and actually try and make the case against Trump, sort of like prosecutors do at an ordinary trial. When Republicans impeached Clinton back in 1998, they picked out 13 impeachment managers who went over and for several days presented their arguments to the Senate once the trial began. So Democrats will now have to pick their own lineup. This is really going to be up to Nancy Pelosi, and she has a lot of Democrats in her caucus who would like to have this high profile role for themselves. And do the Republicans get to pick some managers too? No, the House majority has voted to impeach Trump. And Pelosi is the Speaker of the House, and she will make the call. You know, though, in theory, this is an institutional move by the House and our more partisan system, which wasn't really anticipated by the founders. The House is controlled by a majority party and they get to call all the shots.

You mentioned the founders. Does the Constitution spell out exactly what happens next? So the Constitution says that the Senate will now hold a trial on the impeachment. So Trump will, of course, remain president until the Senate decides on his guilt or innocence. And that trial is expected to happen in January. When this heads over to the Senate in January, what happens first? So first off, the Senate has to decide on the procedures that it will use for this impeachment trial. And there's already a back and forth about that between Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. Senate Democrats believe strongly that the trial must be fair. A fair trial is one where senators get all the facts and one that allows them to adjudicate the case impartially.

He wants the Republicans to commit really early to call four specific witnesses, acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, former National Security Advisor John Bolton, White House aide Robert Blair, and Office of Management and Budget official Michael Duffy. The four witnesses we propose have direct knowledge of why the aid to Ukraine was delayed.

We don't know what kind of evidence they will present. They might present exculpatory evidence that helps President Trump. It may be incriminating against the president, but they should be heard. And how did Mitch McConnell respond to that? So McConnell on Tuesday morning announced that he wanted to follow the precedent set by the Bill Clinton impeachment trial in 1999. Instead of a tried and true 1999 model, start the trial and then see how senators wish to proceed, the Democratic leader wants to write a completely new set of rules for President Trump. So McConnell is saying, we don't have to decide this witness issue right now.

We can postpone it until the trial is actually underway and then see if people actually want to hear witnesses. And that was a Republican-controlled Senate during the impeachment proceedings of Bill Clinton. Yes, it was. But, you know, that was a Republican Senate that was reviewing an impeachment case presented by a Republican House. This time around, we have a Republican Senate reviewing an impeachment case presented by Democrats against a Republican president. So McConnell has sort of, you know, he's taking refuge in precedent, but he has also made his own political objectives clear. He went on Fox News last week. And everything I do during this, I'm coordinating with White House counsel. There will be no difference between the president's position and our position as to how to handle this to the extent that we can.

And he declared that there's no way that the president is going to be removed from office in this trial. So he is saying precedent, precedent, precedent, but he also wants to get his way. However, to get his way, he will have to keep a handle on his Republican majority. It takes 51 votes to pass anything related to the impeachment trial. So it's really going to be up to the senators who are Republicans from competitive states or those who have shown a willingness to criticize Trump. They will have to decide what they want to do with this witness issue. People like Mitt Romney of Utah, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, maybe Cory Gardner of Colorado.

And those are the people who are going to be the really key votes when they do get to the question of witnesses. Is there any guarantee that this process is going to be fair if Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, is already saying before the trial even begins that there will be no daylight between the Senate and the White House? Well, McConnell's argument is that it's in fact the House that's being completely unfair. He said that they rushed to impeach Trump with a slapdash process. They barely even tried to get some of these witnesses to testify who Senate Democrats are now asking for. But, you know,

impeachment is a political process. But Mitch McConnell's argument is that Democrats barely tried to get the witnesses that the Senate Democrats now want, the same witnesses that the White House forbade from testifying. Yes, the White House has blocked them from testifying. But McConnell has reportedly made clear in private that he wants no witnesses to be called at all. In part, this is because President Trump has been making various extreme demands that he's uncomfortable with. Trump wants to call Hunter Biden as a witness. He wants to call Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House call Hunter Biden as a witness. He wants to call Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, as a witness. And Republicans don't really love

that in the Senate. They think these requests are kind of ridiculous on Trump's part. But their solution to this may be to simply call no witnesses at all. Which means we won't get to see the president himself directly testify in his impeachment trial. Reportedly, Trump has mused about perhaps wanting to testify in his own defense, but his lawyers and his political people seem to think that would be a very bad idea and that the best approach for him is to just get this over with. If the Senate holds a relatively brief trial that quickly results in his acquittal, then he can just move on to other stuff rather than making it a big show, a spectacle of him going and arguing his innocence before the Senate. It sounds like a lot of the disagreements between Republicans and Democrats

and even the White House have been whether witnesses are called, which witnesses are called. Have there been any other major sources of contention here? The length of the trial, who Democrats eventually call should view their own roles in this process, whether they are merely passive jurors, whether they're supposed to keep an open mind, whether they're allowed to come to conclusions in advance, and so on. And according to the standing rules of Senate impeachment trials, the members of the Senate are supposed to take an oath beforehand saying that they will solemnly swear that in all things appertaining to the impeachment trial, they will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws. And so Democrats have been arguing that, you know, for McConnell to say he's working with the White House and for other senators like Lindsey Graham to say that. I am clearly made up my mind. I'm not trying to hide the fact that I have disdain for the accusations in the process.

So I don't need any witnesses. Democrats have been crying foul saying, you know, you should really take this process and these accusations more seriously. Try to weigh the evidence and the arguments that are presented to you and make up your minds in that way. While we're on the roles the senators will play, I mean, Mitch McConnell is the Senate majority leader, but he's not the judge in this trial, is he? So we will see Chief Justice John Roberts making an unusual appearance in the Senate floor. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court presides over a presidential impeachment trial. But the Chief Justice, if he follows the example

set by Chief Justice William Rehnquist in 1999, will not actually do much. Rehnquist kind of sat back and let the Senate run the trial as they saw fit. He said afterward, I did nothing in particular and did it very well. That's a great self-assessment there, Rehnquist. So we've got C.J. John Roberts as the judge. We've got the Democratic impeachment managers from the House as the prosecutors. Who is defending Donald? So there's also discussion about that going on in the White House. Trump will at some point designate lawyers to make his case. And that'll be interesting because he decided not to do that in the House. He didn't engage in the House process at all. So we will finally see

Trump's legal team show up in the Senate to make their own arguments. And what should we expect from his legal team? An actual defense of the president's actions like we got in the letter he sent Nancy Pelosi last night, or just more of the witch hunt, witch hunt that we also got in the letter he sent to Pelosi last night? Maybe both. I'll get you, my pretty, and your little dog too. There were a lot of speeches and grand proclamations being made during the impeachment hearings in the House. Is it going to be a similar scene in the Senate or will this be a more sort of solemn affair? The really interesting thing about how the process plays out in the Senate is that if the example of the Clinton trial is followed, senators don't actually get to speak during the trial. They have to sit there and listen as the House impeachment managers make their case and then as the defense lawyers for the president make their case.

Very different from what we're used to seeing at a congressional hearing with a ton of bloviating from the senators. McConnell has indicated that he is going to follow this example. And he said, maybe it would be a good change of pace for some of his colleagues to have to be quiet for a bit and sit back and listen rather than talking. Is he talking about Lindsey Graham? He's probably talking about the Democrats mostly. Will this be televised like the House hearings were? Yeah, C-SPAN 2, probably all other major networks will be covering this.

I wonder, you know, we watched the House Intelligence Committee hearings, and that seemed more like an investigative process. Then we watched the Judiciary Committee hearings, which seemed like a total circus. Is there a risk here that when this goes to the Senate and you've got the president's attorneys in the room, you've got multiple candidates for president in 2020 in the room, you've got the chief justice of the Supreme Court in the room, and you know, the rest of the Senate, that if this doesn't look like functional American democracy, that it could harm this process in the future? I don't think there's any way to make an impeachment trial look pretty. This is an effort to remove an elected president from office for alleged high

crimes and misdemeanors. That's serious stuff. And naturally, the president and his defenders are fighting back against it while the prosecutors are arguing that these high crimes and misdemeanors did in fact happen and meriting his removal. So it's going to be nasty for sure. I do think that the Senate trial will be an interesting change of pace from what we've seen in the House just because of some of the matters we've discussed, how senators won't get to speak, how the president's lawyers will be participating. So maybe there will be a bit more dignity to the proceedings than we've seen so far. But don't expect sunshine and rainbows and inspiring examples of democracy in action.

Okay, great. Well, I look forward to discussing whatever the opposite of sunshine and rainbows is with you in the new year, Andrew. Thank you. Sure. That's Andrew Prokop. He's a senior correspondent covering politics at Vox. I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Ukraine Explained.